Ushpizin

Sukkot miracle is answer to prayers3halfstarsGo to showtimes

AMY BIANCOLLI, Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Published 6:30 am, Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Devout believers of any persuasion rarely get a fair shake in movies. Most of the time, the profoundly religious are characterized in one of two ways: as saps who make faith look easy or as crackpots who make it look nuts.

With Ushpizin, they finally catch a break. In this warm, modestly proportioned chamber study of faith's exacting gifts, a poor Hasidic couple in Jerusalem prepare for the holiday of Sukkot (also called the Festival of Booths, commemorating the Israelites' journey to the promised land) by asking God to send a miracle. Not an earthshaking, sea-parting miracle: just money to cover food for a week of worship, plus a sukka, a makeshift hut, in which to eat. And they ask for "holy ushpizin:" guests sent by God to share their meals and prayers.

Almost instantly, God says yes.

The fallout from this answer forms the movie. "God Almighty, you're for real. You did it big time," proclaims Malli Bellanga (Michal Bat-Sheva Rand) as she and her husband, Moshe (screenwriter Shuli Rand, real-life husband of Michal), marvel at an envelope stuffed with cash. It has arrived anonymously and miraculously at their doorstep, around the time that a friend led Moshe to an abandoned sukka, ready for the taking.

So there they have it: money for food, sukka for meals and worship. Now all they need are guests.

Ah, but look: two convicts on the run from authorities. One of them, Eliyahu (Shaul Mizrahi), is a pal of Moshe's from the old days when Moshe was a bit of a reprobate himself: godless, prone to drinking, prone to fights. Eliyahu and Yossef (Ilan Ganani) aren't especially violent, but they're none too spiffy, and they're rude. Despite Malli's justifiable reservations about this pair, she and Moshe welcome them as divinely sent ushpizin for the holiday.

A wealth of misfortune slowly accrues. The guests wear on the hosts. They wolf down food, slosh down alcohol and flaunt religious prohibitions, outraging neighbors with their dancing and drinking in public. Their behavior tempts the righteous Bellangas to reject them, but each obnoxious turn is welcomed as a test of faith and an avenue to a blessing. It's a kind of piety rarely explored on screen — a piety of struggle, of the fighting urge to find God in the effort of living. For Moshe and Malli, divine love is a hard love, but its very hardness is a godsend.

Directed by Israeli filmmaker Gidi Dar from Rand's heartfelt script (once a successful secular actor, Rand and his wife are converts to orthodoxy), Ushpizin has the forthright, disarming manner of its characters. What impresses most is its unapologetic portrait of a religious subculture so often cast — in mainstream American films, anyway — as constricted and strange.

In the end, Dar's film is a bit too trim, wrapping up secular and sacred in a tight little bundle of narrative closure. A plot element I haven't mentioned (for reasons of spoiler-avoidance) follows its inevitable course and comes to its inevitable conclusion, which I guessed in the first reel but still found delightful in the last.

For I was charmed by Ushpizin and couldn't deny it anything — not my laughter, not my neatly extracted tears. It had me, this film with blessings on its mind. It's no small blessing itself.